A visit to Yahoo!'s venerable online file storage service, Briefcase, reveals the following the missive:

Death of virtual luggage

A Yahoo! spokeswoman confirms the service will retire from this world on the last day of March. "[Briefcase] was launched nearly 10 years ago and usage has been significantly declining over the years," she tells us. "Users outgrew the need for the service and turned to offerings with much more storage and enhanced sharing capabilities, e.g. Yahoo! Mail and Flickr. Discontinuing the service allows us to focus our efforts on more broadly used products, in line with our commitment to deliver the best possible user experience."

As that online death notice explains, users must remove their online files by March 30 or they will vanish forever. It shouldn't take long to remove them. The Briefcase tops out at 30MB.

And so, the YDrive follows AOL's XDrive into the online storage graveyard. But Redmond still offers its 25GB SkyDrive, billed as a cloud-based storage extravaganza. And of course, the Mountain View Chocolate Factory is secretly fluffing its GDrive cloud.

Yahoo! says that users have left the Briefcase because other services offer more storage and more nimble tools. And that's certainly true. But you can also blame the zeitgeist. Over the past ten years, the digerati have abandoned quaint metaphors like Briefcase and Superhighway in favor clouds and, well, more clouds. They've abandoned Yahoo! for Google.